NYC's Hottest Steakhouse Only Has 10 Tables | On The Line | Bon Appétit

The 86 is a historic American steakhouse. I have a 107 day aged coffee and tobacco crusted strip that's bone in. We also have these beautiful spinalis dorsiases. We are licensed to carry 27 different prefectures of Japanese Wagyu. I believe it's probably the best Wagyu that you can ever taste. One thing great about the 86 is we are small but mighty. It's like an attack battle sub here. Every little spot is hyper designed and focused. We are unconventional. We are uncompromising and we are lunatics in hospitality. Hello, I'm chef Michael Vignola here at the 86 in the West Village in the heart of New York City. Come on in. It's 10 a.m and we're already behind. 10 tables, 35 seats, 102 year old restaurant. Some of the cool things about this room, you have Hemingway's booth. He used to pass out drunk there all the time. Welcome to the kitchen here at the 86. This is it guys. It's 200 square feet of pure power and a little bit of mayhem. Let's go check out the boxes and walk downstairs. Heading down to the belly of the beast here. You'll notice things at the 86, every square foot is hyper designed and utilized. A storage for above. We built this little shelf. We have pop-up tables for polishing and for to go as well as our linen storage for our uniforms and jackets. Watch your step as we navigate through dish land. Right now we're in the prep area as well as raw bar down here. We have pastry underneath. Into our walk-ins. First thing we're gonna do is check on what's in the aging box. We have a few different specimens here. This is our beautiful bone-in American Wagyu coffee and tobacco crusted, stripped about 107 days old at this point. So coffee and a cigarette. One of my two vices left that I have are Marlboro Reds and cold brew coffee. I also think they go amazing with steak. They bring out the unctuousness in the beef. They really pair well and give you a height of umami. I wish you had similar vision. One of my other favorite cuts is here is the spinalis. This is the deckle or the rib cap, the spinalis muscle off of the ribeye. 100% prime. American, corn-fed, grain finished. This has been lightly aging for about 11 days. You can see the bark is really starting to develop on here. It's got some great funk to it. This is just about right. We're gonna portion this later. We're gonna serve this up tonight. We get these amazing ducks from Joe Jurgowitz where we utilize the entire animal. You have these dry-aged breasts. These have about six days on them at this point. We get them fully un-eviscerated, means guts, necks. Everything is still intact. There's confit in the sausage. There's foie gras in the sausage. There's also duck meat. And these beautiful necks that were a natural casing for them. I wanted to showcase the whole animal. We're gonna go upstairs. We're gonna start off with some of the butchery work. Corner, coming down. Fine. I'm gonna pause right here. I gotta grab a cutting board. Corner, coming to mind. We do as much as we can upstairs and as little as possible downstairs. Knife cuts and prep all happen downstairs. Any of the live cooking, sauces, stocks, etc. All made here in the kitchen. We're gonna fabricate some of our beautiful Stone Axe 8'9 Filet Mignon. Marbled beef, score 9+. That means it is a 9 of 11 on the amount of intramuscular fat in the filet. You're gonna notice the filet. It's kind of got two different parts. The eye or the tronch and then this head. So we're just gonna come in and free this gently up. See the bigger pockets of fat? We're gonna pull that off. All of this gets saved. It goes into what we call beef love. We finish our steaks in a variety of different fats and tallows. Stone Axe in Queensland, Australia. It's crossbred program of American and Australian bulls. Really rich minerality. They get to feed on seagrasses. It naturally gives it a little bit of a salinity to the meat. I think it is the best filet in the world, although I'm not a filet eater personally. I do of course, you know, for science. But it is a delicious unctuous filet. We open at four o'clock. We found that four o'clock is the new nine o'clock. There's a lot of diners that don't want to eat this nighttime anymore. I know for myself, I'd rather take the earlier res and go to bed. So for those of you kids out there, I'm here for you four o'clock. It's the new nine. We're gonna kind of mark off what a portion looks like visually beforehand. As you can see, it tapers, right? But you want to make sure you hit your weight on everything. We're shooting for like a six ounce portion. Oh, right on the money. When I talk about the intramuscular fat, look at that marbleization. It's just really runs through there. It's not like a normal filet. Normal filets you see are just plain red. This has beautiful amounts of that snowflake fat or marble through it. These are gonna get sent downstairs. Our butcher is gonna finish tying and trussing these. What we do is kind of round them out a little bit and we tie them up. It keeps it uniform in shape and size. It also ensures that my chef and cook who's cooking this piece is looking at inspecting it before it goes out. Meaning he has to cut this off after it's been rested. So he's judging the quality. He's judging his sear and his doneness. It's just another level to ensure consistency. We truly believe you cannot be great if you are not consistent. Next up, we're gonna butcher our dry aged deckle. So these are for tonight's service. It's the spinalis. It's the outer rib cap of the ribeye. So as you can see, it tapers. It's not a perfect card. What we're gonna cut are these beautiful kind of five ounce bricks or like deck of cards out of it. It's a really unique cut. It's extremely expensive. After it's yielded, it's roughly, you know, 80, 90 bucks a pound. And we'll get four per steak roughly. So there's eight of these per steer. In the grand scheme of things, not a lot. So really bespoke cut to us. First thing we're gonna do is cut this little tail off. This will grind. We'll use it in our beef jus. It'll also go into our debris for our Wagyu French dips. And I just start with kind of removing some of this excess pellicle or skin. I am very fortunate enough that I have some amazing partners in Allen Brothers and in the Dakotas that they hold these for me. And don't forget, it is pulled off of a rib. So it's not that there aren't a lot of them. Just nobody does this. They don't want to put the work in. They don't want to dry age it themselves. They don't want to pay for it. It's a true luxury item. It's nicely trimmed up. See the difference from there to there. It's insane. I think there's a lot of good dry age, and then there's some great dry age. I think if you like funky blue cheesy, I think that's way overwrought personally. What I love about dry age is the mouthfeel it gives you and a little bit of that funky parmesan umaminess. I love everything about this steak. It's a loss leader. I don't make a lot of money on this steak. It barely breaks even the covers cost of it. But it's an honor to be able to serve it to guests and have them enjoy the experience of the Dako. All right, we're gonna move on with our day. Coming in boys. Hey, let's talk sardines. One of my favorite fish. Beautiful ayahuasches from Hokkaido. They get full in rigor. You can see they're still nice and stiff as a board. Beautiful clean eyes. Everybody knows sardines from, you know, their grandma used to eat X, Y, and Z sardines on a pita crackers. This is not them. I really prefer the Hokkaido Japanese sardines versus the Mediterranean ones. I feel like they're higher in fat. Colder the waters, the more fat they have. Higher in those omega-3s. It just tastes slightly better to me. We take our beautiful ayahuasches, clean the head, clean the tail, make a small incision here. And then we're just going to use our fingers to really clean out everything else. They are soft enough that we are going to find the center bone and gently just rub our nail around it. Our amazing corporate sushi chef Stanley showed me this technique many moons ago and it stuck with me. For those of you that are butchered sardines, it is not easy to do that. Once we have it cleaned, we take off a little bit of the belly here, trim it up, then these are ready for cure. This dish ends up as a three-piece kind of crudo. It gets finished with a hot, warm garlic oil, a little bit of a minus eight ice wine vinegar, some fresh herbs, and breakfast radish, as well as this amazing sardine toast on the side. Sardines are done. Go back down to get our scallops. Behind, behind. These came in just from mass today. Beautiful live sea scallops. We're going to deshell them, shock them. They're going to be an addition tonight. Back upstairs. Corner. We actually have two entrances to the kitchen. The main pass through our door here to slip or the other way. Come on. This is through our service area. Always got to knock. Make sure you don't run into somebody. It's tight. It's kind of a one-way thing. Through the alleyway, they say. Watch your step through the gangplank. Here's where we keep our firewood and into the kitchen. We're going to shuck some of these beautiful sea scallops. We're going to do them slightly grilled and more of a crudo, kind of a tataki style. You want to get your thumb in here. Really kind of just free it up from the shell. Make sure you're not missing anything up. Keep that guy for display. Not really a knife, not really a spatula. It is a flexible little guy. It's great for everything from long distance to short, small things, strokes. As you go through your career, you just kind of collect tools, whether you bought them, you stole them, you borrowed and never gave them back. This guy right here, it is one of one. This burl came from my sister's backyard in Raleigh, North Carolina, Holly Springs to be exact. The copper is from the flat iron building window casements. The white between it is ivory from Steinway Piano Keys, where my brother-in-law worked for 25 years as a polisher. And then it is a coil spring that was also dug up in the area. It is an extremely specific knife to me. The three rings are for each of my kids, Mia, Michaela, and Ronnie. It's kind of like they're with me all day. We're going to take our beautiful shells. We're going to give them a boil. I lied. We're going to get a bigger pot. You're going to ask me how I get water. Well, we go down here. Chef Winston likes to open up. We have our beautiful tea off the combi line. And here is our kitchen faucet. All you chefs out there that have dedicated culinary sinks, I salute you. We're going to clean our scallops right here. We have a little bit of cold water. I like to put some Maldon in there just to kind of keep that seawater flavor while we're rinsing off some of that sand and silt from the scallop dredging. Clean gloves. You'll see me reaching kind of everywhere throughout the night. One thing we love is convertible items like magnetic. It sticks to the wall. I have a small little cabinet up here. This is everything that we use for the pass. I also love these little organizers. They hold all sorts of random stuff. So I'm just pulling it apart, cleaning off this beautiful frill and all the guts. You're left with this amazing, beautiful, plump scallop. Leave them in there just to get off some of that silt and sand. We'll let it soak for a few minutes. We just got in our Dover souls from Jean-Marc. I'm going to run downstairs. Put it right here. Beautiful. Dover souls, wild caught. You can tell by the whiteness of their bellies. They are beautifully fished. Super pristine. Came from the south of France. We got four pieces in today. That's for tonight's delivery. Yes. Thank you. Looks like we're doing Dover's next since they showed up. Behind, behind, atras. We are going to butcher, brine, and get these ready for tonight's service. First things first, sanitize. We're going to cut right up here. You can see where it kind of naturally bends. We're just going to go in there, cut through, make a clean incision, flip it over under this little dorsal here, score it, and then we're going to pop the center bone out. These scissors are garden shears. They cut through clean. They cut through the bone. They also don't rip or tear any flesh. And then we're going to lightly skin this fish. Just get your thumb under there. This is one of my favorite tasks of the day. Peel it. One shot. Knock them out. Our Dovers are done. They're in the brine. Do you want to guys do cups up? Cups up. This is where we come upstairs. Chef Winston brings up the AM cruise food. This is some of the mise en place that we're going to walk through for today. Let's go. Squash beer, I need some. Taste the squash beer. It's a little grainy. It's not. It's very under seasoned. I taste the orange. I taste a little bit of squash. I don't taste any seasoning besides that. I add more salt. Oh, this is very good. So notes were that this needs more salt, probably some nutmeg. This is the Caesar dressing. We need to get that blended a little bit more. It's a little grainy. We said the celery root here I need. You should blend, like add and blend it, like into it, like an emulsion. Yeah. That's where I think you're getting the graininess from. You're making pebbles of the cheese. Black pepper, uh, onion spread, a little bit of salt. No acid either. It needs a little bit of sherry. We don't really have a whole lot of like acid in that. It needs it. We're getting the rest of the order together, spot checking, and then getting staff the orders for tomorrow. Let's rock and roll. Beautiful. Thank you, Chef. That went pretty well. There's always some tweaks, pivots, talk through discussions. Hello? We're always fighting deliveries here in New York. One of our amazing partners in it all is Chef Arnold, as I like to call him. We've been arguing back and forth about butchery and specs. Arnold and I were on a call as I was driving in, and I said, cut me X, Y, and Z, and let's look through them. Less than 24 hours later, here they are. This is the first cut off the Westholm short loin of Australian Wagyu porterhouse. This steak is beautiful. We talk about the best of both worlds. It's this kind of piece right here. I'm just going to cut it out. We'll save that for our beef love, and this will be a great, beautiful porterhouse for us. Beautiful T-bone, end-to-end. Needs a little bit of age on it and tighten up. It just came out of cryo, so it'll start to bloom shortly. How many ounces? 24? I could go bigger. This is going to be a special as we head into the spring months and spring menu. Oh, that's beautiful. This is a bone in Kansas City. Cut off the short loin again as it tapers down. We're kind of left with these edges, as I only want beautiful. This is from Rosewood, one of the original Wagyus in America. Rosewood didn't start commercially producing Wagyu for sale until 96. They waited 20 years of genetics that are really rich in this beef. I think it is bar none the best American Wagyu you can purchase. Arnold, again, I can't thank you enough for all you do, jumping to the hoops for us and making us look good. I'm glad to see you here, my friend. Thank you, Arnold. We're still running and gunning. We've got some more deliveries coming in. My amazing friend, Estelle. Come on in. Beautiful. How are you doing? I've known Estelle for a very long time. I brought you some spring items. Wild strawberries grown in Malaga, Spain. They're super perishable. They die before the end of service, but at their peak, they are the best strawberry you can get. We will offer these tonight for some VIPs. We'll send them out. Just a little thank you, a gesture to them. As we talked about, we love luxuries. We like to showcase them. We like to highlight amazing things in season. You can't do these types of things with normal people. You need nut jobs like Estelle here, who is amazing at what she does. She runs around this city. She used to be on a bicycle, and now she's in a van. She's got a whole big business and amazing children. I take the subway. Subway now? More relaxing. You're in full production? Yes, for another couple of months until it gets too hot over there, so end of June. Okay. How much a flat? $3.25 for two kilos. How many of these is in two kilos? Fifteen. Okay. That's doable. Yeah. Affordable luxuries. Thanks. For VIPs. Wild asparagus coming from the long region, southwest of France. Look at that. These are one of the items that is going to be featured on our spring menu. Morels from Oregon. A fresh burn or cultivated? Fresh, wild. Black winter truffles. Those are pieces. I don't want pieces. This is it? This is it. And then we're at a gap season? Last week. Gap season until the Australian black end of June. Do you want to use your scale or my scale? I'll use your scale. I trust you. Are you still doing deliveries or who's your normal guy? I do deliveries, of course. I love to see the chefs. It would be boring, my job, if I was not making deliveries. You'd be too adult. I'll see you later. Thank you, Estelle. The best. Estelle Strega. New York City chefs. You know, you know. At least we got snacks. Trying to get through things. Cooks are coming in. We're in the proverbial poops, as you will. As you can see, the line is getting full. During service, it's only about three or four of us in the kitchen. This is the crossover time, the chaotic. This is what I love. I still have to clean some foie. Hudson Valley foie gras. Grade A. It's the most unblemished liver. Foie is the engorged liver of a duck or a goose. It is fed corn until the liver kind of gets fatty and unctuous, and then it is chilled and served. It's two different lobes attached. To clean the foie, I'm really going to use two tools, offset and a spoon. It's literally just coming in, coming under, not blemishing the outside of the skin, because that's going to help seal our torchon later on. Torchon is French for towel. It is going to be a rolled terrine that is lightly poached in plastic. We cure this foie in a mixture of salt, coriander, dark brown sugar, a little bit of pink salt or sodium nitrate to help keep the color beautifully pink, as well as cognac, sauternes, and muscat. All that saves when we push it through a sieve later on. You can see the vein runs right through it. The healthier the foie is, the less veins it has in it. See the vein there? Gently work it out. We're all done here. We're going to run to a PX meeting with Leigh. I'm going to speak to you there. Let's go. Let me introduce you to our general manager, Leigh Codsman. Leigh's been with me nine, 10 years now. We're going to go over our PXs. PXs are any friends of the brand, friends, special notable guests, special occasions that we're dealing with. We have 17 first-time diner reservations, so we can have a little fun tonight. Yeah, absolutely. Are we doing white asparagus tonight? We'll have white asparagus, probably four orders. We'll figure out through the book where they go. Whoa. Holy s**t. The world's best. 101 just came out that we are the best steakhouse in the US and number 12 in the world. That's pretty crazy for this little joint six months in. I'm going to be real, guys. This is pretty humbling. It's a little surreal. Wow. What the f**k? Did you guys just hear that? We became best in the US. Forget number 12 in the world, we're best in the US. Holy s**t. This little f**khole. You guys did that s**t. You guys. I'm so pumped right now. I'm sweating. I'm excited. I am really like, ha. I'm so excited. It's so hot in this restaurant right now. That's wild. Let's go. We're behind. It's 3.30. Time for pre-shift. We're going to check in with the team, see where we're at for the day. What's up, guys? Happy Wednesday. Tonight, we are featuring five orders of stone crabs. I have one held back for VIP if we need some more to up them. We changed the end dives for the Waldorf salad, so I'd like some feedback on that tonight. It's a new organic end dive. We also shock them in a little bit of ice water and acidulate them or move them around. It tends to lessen that bitterness, kind of like broccoli rabe. It was something that my aunt had mentioned. We tried. We did it here. It's fantastic. A little while ago, I got an insane phone call. We became number 12 in the world on the 101 best steakhouse list. To the crew that does this in and out, in a basement, up a staircase, through a doorway, in a hallway, and you guys make it all happen, I can't tell you how incredibly grateful and humbled I am to work amongst you all. You've made this kid from Queens extremely happy and very grateful. And if I talk anymore, I'm going to cry. So I'm going to stop talking, and this is for you guys. To number 12 in the world, number one in my heart, 86 on me, 86 on three. One, two, three. 86! All right. It's 3.50. We flipped the kitchen. We've now taped the pass or our folding table. Lights come down. Chef Winston and I do our dance for the night. Before that, it's fitting in the pass. Chef, you have it? You can see these very custom brackets we have here. So it comes, sits in, lock it in, lights up. Chef printer goes in. We've talked about it all day. Now it's time. It's battle. Service starts. My station is here. Look at that. Right on cue. Orders are coming in. Walking in. Churro, lobster pasta, on back, Waldorf, deck on mid-well. Guys, as you can see, service is getting hectic. I'm going to need you to get the f*** out of here. Have a good night. Thank you.